This invention relates generally to computer software and systems, and more particularly to methods for serving advertising via a network, such as the Internet.
Third party advertisement serving on the Internet arose as a method for advertisers to use third parties to deploy web-based advertising and to measure and validate the quantity and quality of advertisements served by a web site. Existing “cookie” technology was adapted in order to enable accurate measurement of the number of unique web page views and click-throughs. Cookies are small text files created and subsequently read by browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and Safari. The browser sends an existing cookie along with a web page request to a web server. If a cookie does not already exist on the web browser, the web server can use a browser's cookie facility to set a cookie and store data therein. A web server might store information, such as access date, domain name, customer type, and activity type.
If a browser views a web page served by a web server that uses cookies, one or more cookies are set to the browser's local repository. Because of the design of the underlying web server/browser technology, when the browser returns to the previously viewed web page at some future time, the web server that originally set the cookie automatically retrieves a copy of the cookie and can then modify it and send it back to the web browser. Additionally, if a cookie was originally set by a web server, the server's domain is granted future access to the cookie even if the browser does not return to the original web server.
As an illustrative example, suppose an advertiser's web site is visited by a web browser, “Browser A.” The advertiser is a company called “Company Name,” and the company has its own domain, web server, and web site. The domain of Company Name is “.companyname.com.” When Browser A views the Company Name web site, the advertiser's web server sets a cookie to Browser A. Browser A then leaves the Company Name web site and visits other web sites, including a web page on a publisher site, “http://website2.com.” Generally, a publisher web site is one that presents one or more different types of content and offers advertisement or banner space therewith. An advertiser can “rent” the banner space from the publisher and can serve advertisements directly from its own web server, or it can arrange to have a third-party company, an “adserver,” serve the advertising. In this example, the advertiser has arranged for an adserver to serve the advertising for the web site. Thus, the publisher's web site, “www.website2.com,” contains a banner ad that is served by the adserver. The adserver has its own domain, for example, “.adserver.com.” If Browser A is configured to accept third-party cookies, the adserver's web server can set a cookie to Browser A.
Whenever a browser has a cookie that is associated with a particular domain, it will send the cookie to the web server within the domain along with any request for web content from the web server. In other words, once a web server has set a cookie on a browser, the browser will send the cookie to the web server unless the browser is specifically set to block the cookie. When a web server receives a cookie, it is available to be written into log files on the server. Even if a web server is set to ignore incoming cookies and take no action based on their content, it still receives the cookies and can log them. Thus, both adservers' and advertisers' web servers have difficulties avoiding their own cookies.
There are two additional facets to web page, web server, and cookie technologies that should be understood. First, the web site listed in a browsers uniform resource locator (URL) address bar may not be serving the entire web page that the browser is displaying. Instead, the various components that make up the web page can be served by different web servers. An individual user could point a web browser to a publisher's web page, for example, that has a frame across the bottom in which an adserver displays an advertisement. Both the publisher's web server and the adserver's web server may set cookies to the user's browser (unless the user has enabled third party cookie blocking. Second, cookies set to a particular web server domain are available to be read by any web server in the domain or sub-domain thereof. For example, Company has a web server “Alpha” that serves a web page from the domain “.company.com” and sets cookie “A” to a particular computer user's browser. When the user subsequently directs her browser to a web page served from the domain “.server2.company.com,” a second company web server “Beta” serves the second web page. Since the web server Beta has a domain under the domain of web server Alpha (web server Beta's domain is called a sub-domain of web server Alpha's domain), each time the web server Beta receives a web page request, it will receive any cookie previously written to the requesting browser by the web server Alpha.
Delivering an advertisement to a browser through an adserver that uses cookies to serve, track, and measure the advertisements that were purchased has advantages. Advertisers use adservers because of the features and benefits they provide, including: counting and measurement of ad performance regardless of the web site on which the advertising appears; independent verification of advertising views and click-throughs; and web-wide, site agnostic implementation, reporting, and measurement of all web-based advertising. However, downsides to using an adserver include the following: third party cookies of the adserver can be blocked by a user or may even be deleted by anti-spyware programs, advertising data gained from adserver cookies is not readily available to the advertiser, the advertiser has to wait until it receives data (e.g., log file data) from the adserver, or the adserver has to build a real-time cookie synchronization process. The reverse is also true; the adserver has to wait to receive log file data from the advertiser or build a real-time cookie synchronization process before the adserver can target advertisements based on customer variables (e.g., customer=high value) that were recently changed by the advertiser. Additionally, a disadvantage of many current cookie synchronization processes is that they are unidirectional as opposed to shared cookie implementation in which data can be shared bi-directionally.
Although much cookie usage can be relatively innocuous, some uses can raise serious privacy concerns as web servers can use cookies to recognize and track web viewing habits of a particular browser. Because data concerning web viewing habits can be valuable, a person's browsing history can be a commodity that is bought and sold. The privacy concerns thus raised by cookie usage have created a backlash among the Internet using populace, causing many users to disable or otherwise limit the cookie features of their browsers. By limiting cookie technologies, browsers are unable to view and access the full content and features of the cookie-enabled web sites.
Because of this backlash against cookie use, the advertising industry is under increasing pressure in some situations to avoid cookie technologies, however, the industry still desires to continue enjoying the efficiencies and benefits of using adservers without the added burden of customer's privacy being intruded upon. Furthermore, because many adservers have created cookies in the past, even if they stop using cookies now, they would still receive and cannot avoid reading any previously created cookies along with any new web pages requests. There is therefore a need, in these situations, for a solution that avoids cookie technologies while still allowing advertisers to use adservers and reap the benefits thereof.